Settlement Phase #2: The Resources Must Flow (Patreon)

As mentioned in the first entry for this series, the settlement is a kind of engine or factory that operates like a worker placement game. The image above serves as a kind of reminder for that. At the start of the settlement phase you feed in resources in the form of returning survivors plus their gear (hereafter called hunters to differentiate their status from the rest of the population) and "actual" resources, then you will operate the machine with your tools, before producing at the far end hunters and gear.

Before we move on, I want to define everything to do with resources fully once and for all along with abbreviations in case I want to use them. Everything you see below is a resource, not just the ones the game directly labels as one.

Population (P) - a vital, variable value resource of survivors that contains all the non-essential categories of survivors (janitor, plebs, potentials, irregulars, retirees). 

Returning Hunters (Rh) - high value Survivors from the hunt team/nemesis team/irregular pool (see last week for the survivor definitions) who return to the settlement, bringing with them various resources. 

Departing Hunters (Dh) - high value Survivors (and their gear) who leave the settlement for the next

Endeavors (E) - a variable value resource generated by returning survivors, graves, cooking or other similar methods.

Monster Resources (Mr) - a high value resource generated by events, returning survivors and their gear.

Basic Resources (Br) - a moderate value resource  generated by events, returning survivors and their gear.  

Strange Resources (Sr) - a variable value resource generated by events, returning survivors and their gear.

Gear (G) - a variable high value resource that is rarely consumed when it is spent. It is generated by returning survivors, events and the settlement.

This is the mindset you want to get into, everything is a resource that is being utilised or spent, heck even lantern years are a resource, you just rarely have the ability to control how these are spent and you have no control over the value of a given lantern year, that's determined by the timeline (nemesis years are typically lower value than hunting years).

Moving ahead, we are going to focus on how one optimises the wheels of their settlement engine and because this is an exceptionally complex machine that iterates on itself by feeding back in the very products it makes (after said products are filtered by the hunt/showdown phase) while also growing through self improvement. It's impossible to say what the 100% correct path is, all one can do is give you the tools so we can make better choices from the options available.

So we will start by looking at the flow of our most vital resource, Population.

The Ebb and Flow of Population

I wrote a bit about this last time, but I always wanted to visualise this process with a flowchart so you can better see why one categorizes the survivors in the settlement. It is very useful given my strong focus on growing population wherever possible (because Collective Toil is insanely strong when you feed it).

In the very first lantern year you will simply designate your survivors as hunters, irregulars, plebs and maybe a janitor. Hunters will number exactly 4, irregulars will either be hunters temporarily missing a hunt because of various things or benched because your first intimacy/death created an amazing survivor.  The Janitor will either be a badly injured survivor from the first hunt or just someone selected as soon as a roll that can kill/main is required (usually not needed until LY2) and everyone else will be plebs. The Plebs are the ones who will risk intimacy if you have four endeavors. NO INNOVATING! 

After that, the process works as follows:

New survivors arrive into the settlement via the newborn status, now this includes survivors created by intimacy and also ones who have been picked up via events. You will sort them into either Plebs or Potentials depending on what the quality of the average survivor is. Plebs and Potentials are a pair of categories in constant flow, they all represent survivors who have not been tested by the hunt, but the baseline value for what makes a Pleb changes over the entire campaign. Initially most survivors are Plebs & Potentials at the same time, but once you start getting things that improve newborn survivors, such as Family, Enduring Legacy, Saga, Clan of Death, Bloodline, Empire etc. The quality of the newborn survivors exceeds those poor souls who have been sitting about in the settlement from the beginning. So the line between Plebs and Potentials becomes more and more strongly defined as time passes.

The Janitor is a simple step, you pick someone who is a bit useless, either a retiree or a pleb, you give them the name Karen or Lee (or another meme name) and then they are on the lottery of pain. Most of the time they will follow that permanent, one way red arrow to becoming a resource (death turns them into an endeavor or basic resource), but sometime, rarely, they'll prove to be a Rupert and slide up into the Potentials pool and become a worthwhile individual. Baptism of fire for the Janitor and I wouldn't have it any other way.

On the right hand side we have the place where Potentials get to be baptised into Hunters, they're going to go out on hunts and experience their own "janitor" churn. Depending on population you may not have room for a full roster of 12-20 survivors (which allows for nemesis specific hunters, lots of bench warmers and 2-4 teams in rotation). But you will have at least one hunt team (preferably 2) and a group of irregulars who get rotated around as "Skip Next Hunt" hits.

It is now time to mention one very important role that is generated by the hunt teams. This is the Murder Bait, the Murder settlement event (alongside Cracks in the Ground and an early Plague) is one of the most catastrophic experiences a settlement can endure and you will have to decide if you are going to use a Murder Bait or not. 

How this works is; you designate a survivor who is working on a low value weapon proficiency (not shield, fist & tooth or spear and certainly not Katar in the Green Armor runs) and they go out on one more hunt than anyone else in the settlement. They are always the highest hunt xp survivor available, they push hard to complete their weapon mastery and max out the track. When they are forced to retire (or are one hunt XP short of forced retirement) they use Family to cement their legacy and now they sit, cooling their heels, waiting to be murdered.  In Lantern one usually uses the Twilight Sword survivor for this one, halting their TS development one pop short of leaving, they can then wait the inevitable or help chop up the Watcher.

Ageless survivors help a lot here because they can deliberately keep their hunt XP low while still progressing on their chosen proficiency, allowing them to avoid being chopped up by the jealous murderer.

The other method available for generation of the Murder Bait is by saviors. Because they gain hunt XP so quickly, you can send them out on 3-4 hunts and then sit them in the settlement, protecting everyone else from being murdered. It's one of the best uses for the savior outside of having them babysit a Durendal or Corsair Coat. 

Boom.

Hunters rotate around the pools of Nemesis, Hunter and Irregulars quite often (hence the white lines). They are successful if they manage to hit the retiree pool with a full weapon proficiency and then they become an Elder/Murder Bait. Otherwise the only way out of this cycle is semi-permanent to permanent retirement because of disorders/injury or death (the red lines).

It's a grim life for all.

The Flow of Resources

Finally, in order to avoid this just being another retreading of how the roles work, we are going to look at how resources flow around. Now this is very, very situational and complex. I am not going to be able to cover exactly how every single resource moves, but I will provide a few visual images that demonstrate the most common conversions for the various resources.

I have included a few list tables in the images at the top, they are just verbal versions of the individual steps.

For the pedants out there; this is by no means exhaustive or comprehensive. But it gives you an idea of how (typically) things flow around, the value of each type of resources and the points where the the process is irreversible.  (Note: the Stone Circle irreversibly turns monster resources into randomly drawn basic ones, this is very useful if you are seeking Love Juice, Scrap or just short on one basic resource type because, say, your White Lion was full of bones).

Hides turn into leather with the aid of an endeavor, and they are interchangeable with the basic hide resource. So this conversion is not irreversible (but it will convert the value of monster hide resources). Likewise, with the aid of an endeavor three scrap can become one iron, and that still counts as one scrap. So it's a reduction in quantity, but an improvement in quality (how refined).

You can also see just how valuable endeavors are, they turn into more different things than anything else. Population (reversible with graves), buffs (settlement, survivor and hunters; both permanent & temporary). But they also turn into locations, gear and even really hard to define things such as hunts against legendary monsters or additional showdowns against valuable nemesis monsters (The Hand, The Butcher, The Slender-Man). You're giving up a lot each time you spend an endeavor, which is why having ways of gaining more and more of them are very valuable.

(There are also some unlisted resources here that have very important purposes, 1x Gorm Brain + 1x Strange Resource for example becomes the next level of the Gorm Innovation chain. I do not have the time to cover every single situation.)

Still, I hope that this chart highlights how the value of resources changes over time, Endeavors only increase in value; Bones and organs (apart from Love Juice) will plateau as you reach saturation in weapons and support gear. Hide remains valuable for a long time because of its up-gradable status into a +hide version and scrap is relatively low value until you are using it for crafting directly or when it is time to convert it to iron and start to make the higher tech level gear.

It should also highlight just how expensive those innovations are!

Going ahead we will start to drill into the various settlement events, timeline events, location abilities and innovation abilities so that we will be able to evaluate what the approximate value each activation has, who should be doing it, when the situational cases are worthwhile and the points where doing nothing at all may pay off big time!